February 28, 2008

2/28: Standing By Their Man

Following conservative talk show host Bill Cunningham's controversial speech at a John McCain rally (in which he used Barack Obama's middle name, "Hussein," three times) and an inflammatory TN GOP press release entitled "Anti-Semites For Obama," liberal bloggers are circling their wagons around the IL senator. Firedoglake's Attaturk accuses the GOP of playing the "race card," while Josh Marshall writes:

"Hopefully, everyone can now see the McCain strategy for running against Barack Obama. Yes, we have some general points on taxes, culture wars and McCain as war hero who can protect us in ways that flash-in-the-pan pretty boy Barack Obama can't. But that's not the core. The core is to drill a handful of key adjectives into the public mind about Barack Obama: Muslim, anti-American, BLACK, terrorist, Arab."

The controversies over Cunningham's remarks and the TN GOP press release come days after a 2/24 AP article with the subtitle, "No Flag Pin, No Hand Over His Heart: Is [Obama] Exposed?" This article infuriated the netroots and led the bloggers at Firedoglake to launch a letter-writing campaign to protest the AP's "smearing" of Obama. It appears that we are already in full general election mode, even though Hillary Clinton is still very much in the race (as some bloggers have pointed out).

DEM FIELD: It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Although Markos Moulitsas has predicted a double-digit win for Obama in TX, other liberal bloggers aren't so sure:

MyDD's Todd Beeton: "The narrative that's developed as a result is that the quirks of the Texas system as well as Obama's superior ground game make an Obama win virtually a certainty, but what if Clinton has stanched the bleeding? A new Public Strategies tracking poll suggests that may very well be the case...Despite all the talk of Obama's eating into Clinton's base, this poll finds Hillary Clinton holding her own among her strongest bases of support...A 3-point lead for Clinton, albeit within the margin of error, is her best poll result out of the state in a week, and it's as good a time as any to remind folks that this thing ain't over."

TPM's Greg Sargent also thinks TX is "anybody's ball game": "The last four public polls show [Obama and HRC] tied or show each winning, always within a margin of five points...One-third of the Texas vote is caucuses, which have historically favored Obama, and the Hillary camp says that its success will depend largely on turnout, particularly among women. Hillary's Texas campaign has made a huge push for early voting...Ultimately, given the state's complex demographics and tortured primary/caucuses process, neither side dares predict the outcome next week."

OBAMA: Here Comes The Sludge

Liberal bloggers are arguing that one of the GOP's strategies for defeating Obama will be to portray him as a Muslim:

TPM's Josh Marshall: "A good deal has been made out of John McCain's repudiation of talk radio yakmeister Bill Cunningham, who led off for McCain at one of his rallies with the full run of Obama sludge. [...] [But] don't insult your intelligence or mine by pretending that John McCain's plan for this race doesn't rely on hundreds of Cunninghams -- large and small -- across the country, and the RNC and all the GOP third party groups, to be peddling this stuff nonstop for the next eight months because it's the only way John McCain have a real shot at contesting this race."

Attaturk: "There are a few themes developing that should be called out now for what they are. First, the racist junk that right-wing radio, blogs, and conservative interest groups are going to throw out. [...] And while this is happening, John McCain will just talk about how terrible this stuff is but he can't stop it; and the media tut tuts it 24/7. And yet FoxNews and Howie Kurtz will keep having these same people on their shows and in their columns and treat them like the respectible contributor to the public discourse they believe them to be."

AMERICAblog's Joe Sudbay: "The Republicans are already getting really dirty. What else have they got going for them? [...] McCain can't distance himself from that strategy. It is his strategy. And, Mark Halperin from Time Magazine already gave tacit approval to a race baiting strategy (despite his claim it was analysis, not advice)"

Atrios: "As we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a humanitarian mission in Islamic Iraq (or a Mission To Kill The Terrorists, depending on which day it is), the [GOP] and its surrogates are going to spend all their time smearing Barrack Saddam Hussein Osama Obama as a closet Muslim (very bad) who is doubly bad because he is intolerant of other religions like Judaism."

OBAMA II: The Netroots Get His Back

Firedoglake's Christy Hardin Smith urges readers to continue participating in Firedoglake's letter-writing campaign to protest the AP's "smearing" of Obama: "To date -- you have sent over 11,800 letters to newspapers all across the country, including well over 1,000 letters each to the NYTimes, the WaPo, USAToday, the LATimes and the WSJ -- and even more letters to local newspapers in every single state. All in the last two days. You guys rock! Successful pushback means we need to cover every base, not just the prominant ones, so we are asking you for a little more help today. If you haven't yet written letters -- especially if you live in OH, PA, FL, NM, CO...pretty much any swing state -- please write one to your local newspapers today."

Todd Beeton: "As we've learned time and again, the librul media is terribly fond of doing the right-wing message machine's dirty work when it comes to defining our candidates for president. Al Gore was the serial exaggerator and John Kerry was the flip-flopper, so when the right-wing smears against Barack Obama began to paint him as unpatriotic, The AP's Nedra Pickler was happy to oblige by running an article whose third paragraph literally begins 'conservative consultants say...' and goes on to quote disgraced right-wing smear merchant Roger Stone as an expert. [...] What the right-wing message machine and its enablers in the media didn't count on this time was that now there's a left-wing message machine, the rock to their scissors."

OBAMA III: Drawing A Line In The Sand

Several liberal bloggers are discussing the recent Obama-McCain dust-up over Iraq:

Open Left's Chris Bowers wants Obama to take a stronger position on residual forces: "Obama's promises to keep residual forces in Iraq [have] a net result of pre-blurring the Iraq issue even for Republicans like McCain who refuse to even say they want to end the war. Not only do residual forces give McCain further amminition on why we should stay in Iraq, but it also gives more credence to the argument that Democrats don't really want to end the war. It might be too late for Obama to promise no residual troops at this point, but as the campaign moves forward he is going to have to do a much better job of differentiating his position on Iraq, and his rational behind that position, from McCain's."

Todd Beeton is worried about the experience gap between Obama and McCain: "Obama's strategy against McCain will, of course, be not only to tie McCain to [George W.] Bush but also to use the argument he's used against Clinton, making experience actually a dirty word and making the case that judgment is more important than Washington experience...The problem for Obama is that over the next few months, McCain can distance himself from Bush but Obama can't gain the experience. The problem for McCain, of course, is that this country deeply hates this war."

OBAMA IV: The Rightroots Ain't Scared

Conservative bloggers appear to be feeling increasingly confident that McCain can defeat Obama:

RedState's Ben Domenech: "Obama comes equipped with many innate gifts that make him the most appealing and pop culturally significant Democratic candidate since John F. Kennedy...[He also] presents not just an inherently flawed candidacy, but a kamikaze leftist candidate, whose out-of-step views will not last the duration of a general election without full exposure, and whose mawkish storytelling can't carry him to the White House without some serious good fortune."

Townhall's Matt Lewis: "I've long argued that John McCain will have an easier time taking on Barack Obama than Hillary Clinton has. This is not to say it will be a cake walk. However, the difference is that McCain will have a much easier time drawing a sharper contrast. [...] It remains to be seen whether or not the American public will be willing to overlook Obama's liberal positions. Right now, though, it's clear most people don't even know about them. And Hillary sure isn't going to make an issue out of them. Obama looks great today, but is this his abogee?"

Right Wing News' John Hawkins: "If Obama's supporters are embarrassed or humiliated by the man's name, that's an issue that they should work through. Maybe they could try sensitivity training? Personally, I like to call Barack Hussein Obama, Barack Hussein Obama every so often solely because liberals freak out about it so much. [...] If John McCain's middle name was, let's say, Arafat, is there anybody, I mean anybody, who doesn't think liberals would be calling him John Arafat McCain all day long?"

IN MEMORIAM: William F. Buckley

Righty bloggers are paying tribute to the conservative intellectual who died yesterday at the age of 82:

• National Review's Editors: "When Buckley started National Review -- in 1955, at the age of 29 -- it was not at all obvious that anti-Communists, traditionalists, constitutionalists, and enthusiasts for free markets would all be able to take shelter under the same tent. Nor was it obvious that all of these groups, even gathered together, would be able to prevail over what seemed at the time to be an inexorable collectivist tide. When Buckley wrote that the magazine would 'stand athwart history yelling, "Stop!"' his point was to challenge the idea that history, with a capital H, pointed left. Mounting that challenge was the first step toward changing history's direction. Which would come in due course."
• Townhall's Hugh Hewitt: "I don't think there is anyone who combined accomplishments of this order with such widespread, genuine and deep affection across the center-right except for Ronald Reagan, who owed much to Buckley, which means we all do."
• NRO's Ramesh Ponnuru: "I believe that he really was indispensable in creating modern conservatism -- something that answered that name may have existed without him, and perhaps been just as strong as a political movement, but it would not have taken the form it did. (In particular, it might not have been oriented toward the free market and limited government.)"
• Townhall's Matt Lewis: "Anyone who is a conservative -- especially a conservative writer (or even blogger) -- owes tremendous a debt of gratitude to William F. Buckley. He made it cool to be a conservative, and in the modern age, he made it possible to be both an intellectual -- and a conservative."
• Michelle Malkin: "I picked up my first issue of NR in college through the conservative student journalism samizdata. Reading the magazine in public was an act of defiance. Embracing the ideas within was an act of heresy."
• Townhall's Jonathan Garthwaite: "Before Townhall.com. Before the blogs. Before [Barry] Goldwater and Reagan. Before [Rush] Limbaugh and [Sean] Hannity, there was Buckley."
• Commentary's John Podhoretz: "From the first to the last, [Buckley] had an intellectually transcendent purpose from which he never deviated: The explication of, defense of, and advancement of, traditional mores and traditional beliefs, and a concomitant commitment to the notion that social experiments are very dangerous things indeed. He was, ever and always, a serious man in an increasingly unserious time."
• The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan: "He helped many understand more deeply that left-liberalism is a profoundly unsatisfying account of human nature and human history. He helped remind us that communism was as evil as socialism was mistaken."

Several liberal bloggers are arguing that Buckley differed from today's conservative pundits:

• Salon's Glenn Greenwald: "But in both style and substance, the Limbaugh-[Ann] Coulter-[William] Kristol-National Review-led conservative movement of today bears little resemblance to what Buckley spent most of his adult life developing and creating. Modern conservative polemicists continue to use Buckley as a symbolic prop behind which they march -- and that exploitation will intensify by many magnitudes now that he has passed away -- yet, as Buckley himself increasingly recognized, today's conservatives repudiate and violate much of what Buckley stood for and believed."
• Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher: "There is a qualitative difference between Bill Buckley and the conservatives of today. I know he had shitty political opinions and the reason I do is because he told me so. Buckley openly embraced racist, McCarthyesque views that he not only acknowledged but defended...[His] honesty, even in the defense of an ideology you might not embrace, was a whole lot easier to deal with than the intellectual hairballs being coughed up by the right today."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: When Red Becomes Blue And Blue Becomes Red

Chris Bowers thinks an Obama-McCain match-up could redraw the U.S. electoral map:

"This year, both likely nominees relied more heavily on independents, cross-over voters, and a sort of 'anti-establishment' coalition within their own parties to earn the nomination. Almost inevitably, these new primary coalitions are thus far resulting in a more fluid, less stable general election than we saw in either 2000 or 2004. [...] There is little precedent to know how the electorate will react to these candidates individually, and even less when they are matched up against one another. The widely varying national polls are a sign of this instability. [...]

We could see some new swing states, and very different red vs. blue divides in 2008 than we have seen in recent elections. [...] Assuming he is the nominee, maybe Obama can win Kansas and Virginia, and maybe he can lose Oregon and Massachusetts. This election could significantly realign the longstanding political divisions in this country, and while that creates uncertainty, it is also a reason to be excited. Instability always provides moments of tremendous political opportunity."

LEST WE FORGET: Some Satire From TPM

Josh Marshall wants answers:

"Can we ignore Sen. Obama's silence about Muammar Kaddafi?

We know that Louis Farrakhan has said positive things about Barack Obama. And he's not the only one. This is the same Louis Farrakhan who has travelled to Libya to meet with and say positive things about Kaddafi, who has long-standing ties to terrorism. And that's not all. The former pastor at Obama's church, Jeremiah Wright, has not only said positive things about Farrakhan. In the 1980s, he went on a trip with Farrakhan to...you guessed it, Libya, to meet with Kaddafi.

With all of Obama's ties to Kaddafi and all Kaddafi's ties to terrorism, not to mention a lot of Muslims and Arabs and blacks, how much longer can Obama stay silent on his relationship to Kaddafi? Does he support Kaddafi? Has he met with him? Will he denounce Kaddafi, notwithstanding that nuclear deal we have with him now?

These questions won't go away.

And I don't think even denouncing is going to be enough. He'll have to reject."

Posted by Ian Faerstein at February 28, 2008 12:49 PM